Synodal reform redesigns the table, but forgets some chairs

Every so often, a church document tells you as much by what it leaves out as by what it says.

The proposed revisions to canon law emerging from the synodal process is a prime example.

On paper, real movement is underway.

Lay people could serve as episcopal delegates and as judges in church tribunals.
Pastoral councils would become mandatory, not optional.
The church would hold diocesan synods and provincial councils at least every ten years. Major superiors of religious institutes would be invited to councils, with representatives elected by their peers.

None of this is trivial. For a church long accustomed to clerical gatekeeping, these steps matter.

The missing guests

But on closer reading, something strange emerges. Lay ecclesial movements — associations, new communities, apostolic networks — are nowhere to be found.

That silence is hard to square with the Synod’s own Final Document. It names movements and associations explicitly as contributors to synodality, able to take root locally while connecting people across nations.

It pictures them carrying the Gospel into hospitals, prisons, migrant centers, schools, and the arenas of culture and politics. These are precisely the frontiers where mission happens.

So how are such groups meant to act “in synergy with the local Church” if they have no seat at the table where the local Church deliberates?

“An individual invited by a bishop
speaks with borrowed authority.”

Individuals, not bodies

The drafts do include lay people. But always as individuals, selected and deemed suitable by someone else.

That distinction matters. An individual invited by a bishop speaks with borrowed authority.

A movement speaks with the accumulated wisdom of a community that has discerned together over years, often decades.

In effect, the drafts treat lay movements as belonging to the Church’s private life — admirable clubs, perhaps, but not public actors with a mandate.

Six decades after the Council, I find that a thin theology of the laity.

Vatican II already spoke

Apostolicam Actuositatem §26 called for councils at every level — parish, diocese, nation, world — to coordinate lay associations while “preserving the proper character and autonomy of each organization.”

It even asked that lay movements be represented in what is now the Dicastery for Laity. That request has never been honored.

The pattern is familiar. The Council opens a door; the institution politely leaves it ajar.

Still time to act

Here is the hopeful part. These canons are proposals, not yet law.

If synodality means anything, it means communities — not just hand-picked individuals — helping shape the Church’s decisions. A church that is missionary by its very nature cannot sideline the groups carrying so much of its mission.

Movements, their members and their allies should say so, clearly and soon.

The table is being redesigned. It would be a shame to build it without chairs for some of the people already doing the work.

This column first appeared on Flashes of Insight and has been republished with permission by Global Catholic.